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Ron's Empire

May 15, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Ron Howard builds his own Vatican.

Hard production

The extensive use of digital sets and digital set extensions in the film was necessary, given that Vatican locations were off-limits. Still, Howard insists these state-of-the-art techniques were conceptually similar to what he's been doing for years.

"I'm not a technological pioneer, and I don't lay awake nights trying to imagine how to use new technology," Howard says. "But the minute I bump into a blind alley on an idea we need to make a story work, I start digging around, and virtual sets helped solve problems here. We needed weightlessness for Apollo 13, decided wires were unsatisfactory, and ended up filming weightlessness on [NASA's KC-135 training plane]. As far back as Backdraft, digital fire wasn't working yet, and we had very ambitious fire sequences. So we built up a fire lab and started experimenting with fuels and materials, learning how to get cameras and actors as involved with the fire as we safely could. We're just doing the same thing here. Everything we did technologically was to address the human side of the story."

Despite all the film's digital work, Howard says the city of Rome itself is at the heart of the picture's vibe. Outside of sacred churches and other Vatican-controlled shrines, the production was able to shoot extensively in and around Rome during a brief, grueling, guerilla-style shoot prior to launching into primary production on the Sony lot.

"I'm glad we shot [in Rome] first, because of the energy of being there and getting what we absolutely needed to get done," Howard says. "But, no matter how big your production is, you need to become a guerilla operation in a city like that, especially during tourist season. It was a hard shoot, but I'm proud of what we got done, because it set the tone for the entire movie."

Totino adds that the Rome shoot was particularly grueling.

"We had some big locations, and I tend to want to light them in a more realistic way, mimicking sunlight, daylight, and evening light that would look real," Totino says. "So it was a huge location lighting job, and we took some bold steps to bring in big sources of light from the outside. I tried to make Rome feel a little modern by using a little bit of color saturation. Tones are very earthy in Rome, so by saturating colors a bit and warming the light, it is kind of a wonderful day portion, since part of the film takes place in late afternoon. That gave me the liberty to really warm up the film.

"But Rome is a very difficult place to shoot. There is a lot of bureaucracy, and a lot of logistical things that are difficult, because the bureaucracy can get in the way of coming up with alternative approaches for things that you might have to change at the last minute. To be honest, it was the toughest [production] experience I ever had."

Most challenging for Totino was lighting the film consistently, since it consists of location elements, stage elements with sets and without, and digital material.

"I had never done a film with this many visual-effects shots," he says. "It can be difficult in that greenscreen environment, trying to visualize where the light is coming from and what it will look like on the walls. When you light a green space, it's like a void, and you have to remind yourself at the moment what it looks like inside St. Peter's Basilica, rather than on a stage. I just tried to keep the light consistent from one location to another. I used the same lighting units, the same distances, and so on. I used a lot of [Mole-Richardson] 20K and 10K beam projectors to create these big shafts of light.

"For example, when we shot [on a stage representing] the Pantheon [in Rome], my fantastic key grip [Michael Popovich] and gaffer [Raphael Sanchez] helped me create those lights through the hole on top of the Pantheon. At different points in the scene, in this green void, we needed the light to move, so we hung four 10K beam projectors on a tracking-rail system that tracked the distance of the set. It would rotate 180 degrees and tilt 45 degrees in any direction and worked fantastic. I told the boys I wanted the sunlight coming from the ceiling, but asked what it would take to move the light from one part of the Pantheon to the other—to cheat it a little. It required a different kind of lighting instrument, so they thought about it, and came up with this tracking-light system. At times, these guys are like engineers. People don't give enough credit to the crew behind the scenes in situations like that, but they really solved a big problem for me."

Totino used Kodak Vision2 100T 5212 stock for all daytime exterior work on the movie, Vision3 500T 5219 for night and dark interior work, and some Vision2 200T 5217 for a handful of interior locations. He later supervised the 4K digital-intermediate process with Howard and colorist Steve Bowen at EFilm.

"We've been doing the DI process so long, that it was pretty expedited, especially because we really planned things out and had EFilm also do our dailies," Totino says. "They scanned the dailies at 2K, and the metadata information was already sorted and on hand by the time we got to the DI. Steve Bowen could apply those numbers and keep things fairly straightforward for the shots not involving visual effects. Obviously, it took some time to get all those shots, so we had to go back and finish those parts, but the fact that we did the dailies at EFilm really propelled us during post time."

Meanwhile, the editorial team was ensconced on the Sony lot, near the stages throughout the bulk of the shoot. That proximity permitted Hanley and Hill to continually run the cut footage with Howard and discuss any necessary adjustments.

"That's the way we have cut for Ron for a long time," Hanley says. "We cut on Avid [Media Composer] Adrenalines [v.2.8.3], but in standard def [with 8TB of Unity storage]. We were previewing the film straight out of the Avid in SD. Our temp mixes for the previews come from us out of the Avid. Early music and sound effects are supplied by our sound and music editors, and then Angus [Bickerton] and the visual-effects guys were supplying us with early visual-effects comps. That way, we could output to DVCAM tape for preview screenings. It's a simple process that works real well for us."

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